| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 212 words from this article are provided below; about 444 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900. By Jennifer Mason. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. x, 229 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8018-8071-8.)
In an important early move in the rehabilitation of sentimentalism, Philip Fisher argued in 1985 that sentimentalism "experiments with the extension of full and complete humanity to classes of figures from whom it has been socially withheld." Fisher named the "novel objects of feeling" subjected to this sentimental experiment as "the prisoner, the madman, the child, the very old, the animal, and the slave" (Hard Facts, 1985, pp. 98–99). In the ensuing decades some of these "objects" have received a great deal of critical attention, while other figures on Fisher's list have seemed less crucial.	1
Jennifer Mason's Civilized Creatures makes a compelling case that animals matter in U.S. emotional and cultural history. She argues that scholars interested in American attitudes toward nature have mistakenly assumed that that discourse exists most representatively in American writings about wilderness and wild animals. In drawing our attention to the animals with which Americans interacted on a daily basis—the animals they rode, milked, ate, and cohabitated with—Mason performs a long overdue correction, one with implications for the historical and cultural study of the environment.	. . .

There are about 444 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.